My youngest has been pestering me to obtain a copy of Robocop for a while. I finally found a cheap DVD set (yes, it’s usually cheaper to by a set of movies than a single film) and so last night I watched it for the first time in many years.
I warned her that I recalled seeing it back in the day and didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t awful, but there was a reason that I didn’t already own it and also that I had difficulty remembering much about it. I grew up during the peak video culture where teenagers would have parties with music and dancing, and then would settle into watching favorite films on the VCR.
Airplane! was a mainstay of such gatherings, as were more niche films like Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn. Aliens was very popular for all the great one-liners.
Anyhow, the premise of Robocop is pretty interesting as is the philosophical question of ensoulment, memory, and of course man vs machine. The core problem with the film is that it is too rooted in its time. The constant newsbreaks and commercials consisting of ham-fisted Reagan-era leftist propaganda are tedious to anyone who lived through the time and completely boring to anyone who didn’t. A huge waste of time and effort that was obsolete within a decade.
On top of that, the villains are extremely cartoonish, and the crime situations make zero sense. If Old Detroit is such a hellhole, no one would keep money out on the counter, and every shop would be a mini-fortress. These kinds of setups were known in the 1980s in actual Detroit, where shops had drive-through bank teller windows behind bullet-proof glass.
Basically the flaws outweigh whatever merits the film had, and I’m not interested in revisiting it again.
Chateau Lloyd 
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